Wednesday, December 31, 2014

We've been looking for a way for Tesla to let players build their own machines. At the end of our last discussion Tommy Occhipinti proposed a tweak to the Artifactfall model where the machine does more every time you add a piece.This latest take requires a few more words, but actually simplifies the base concept. Instead of a machine with a bunch of moving parts which double up when we add a new component, we get a machine that turns on every time we improve it.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day12/30/2014 - When I found this design in my drafts folder, the ability was keyworded ('flailing'). I can see a handful of cards with this ability over as many years, but it's clearly not worth its own vocabulary.

I imagine it be to primary in green and secondary in black, maybe white. Thematically it could be red, but there just aren't many red creatures that would actually benefit from it.

Friday, December 26, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day12/18/2014 - The Fog variants from the last WAC made me realize there's been no simple Fog cantrip. For the most part, skilled drafters ignore Fog except as a sideboard response to cards like Overrun or Flying Crane Technique. Making it a cantrip should make it more main-deckable…

The trouble is that an efficient Fog cantrip would likely be just too good for Turbo-Fog, a deck that we're happy can exist, but is non-interactive enough that we don't want to ever be The Best Deck in any format.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

This will look like a strategy article at first blush, but the strategy is one everyone who's drafted Khans of Tarkir more than a few times should already know, and that I assume has already been written about a dozen times; this post is more about the design that led to the strategy.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day12/15/2014 - Last week I posted four R-D dragons and Evan made an important observation: "The white, blue, and black ones all feel like they could be monocolored examples of those colors' respective iconics." And he was dead-on. The white one could easily be a mono-white angel; the blue one would make an odd sphinx, but is monoblue; and the black one would be an unusal demon but is monoblack. Clearly, these dragons have to feel as red as they do their second color, and they have to feel more like dragons than not.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Cool Card Design of the Day12/11/2014 - I happened upon a Question Mark or similar about how we see red's iconic creature in every color, which is obviously an odd thing to do with a color's iconic and something we see almost none of with the other color's iconics. The answer, of course, is that dragons are everyone's favorite creature type in Fantasy and pretty much everywhere else.

To that end, I propose a cycle of dragons for each color that are also red, so that each color can have their dragon-y fun without robbing red of its iconic creature.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Why do champions exile a creature of their own kind? You could say they're protecting those creatures, shielding them from all possible harm as long as they last, but then why would having a creature be a requirement?

Friday, December 5, 2014

Weekend Design Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's challenge and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Tesla seems like a prime location to capture the feeling of building your own machine. Looking at last week's discussion, a pretty common approach was directly grafting additional abilities onto artifacts from one another.I want to pin down just how plausible an idea that is.

Cool Card Design of the Day10/00/2014 - I've been getting déjà vu on a lot of my designs for a while. I expect some of that is because I'm inevitably returning to certain compelling ideas, and some of it is just a paranoid byproduct of having shared as many designs as I have over nearly 7 years. (!)

I couldn't find this in the archives, but if you can, let me know. This is the closest I could find.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day11/25/2014 - It's been a while since I've designed a card from the art down, but my repository is waning and I found this piece and had to do something with it. I imagine it supports a story moment in which a red character named Kemral repays a betrayal from a black-aligned ally, but that's all fluff.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Monday, November 17, 2014

I was recently looking back through some of the work we've compiled for Tesla seeking out common threads. Clearly our ideas influence one another, but if an idea keeps coming up it means one of two things: either it's a Melvin-y design challenge, or it hits on something endemic to human nature that we're anxious to experience.

Cool Card Design of the Day11/17/2014 - I discovered last night that the Weekend Art Challenge I had scheduled never went live. Sorry about that, artisans. Mid-week challenges have done poorly in the past, so I'll save it for this weekend. Instead, I'll be sure to post more CCDDs to discuss this week.

First up, I was listening to MaRo's Lessons Learned podcast about Scars of Mirrodin and it occurred to me to wonder if the set had to have -1/-1 counters. Consider this:

Friday, November 7, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day11/4/2014 - Here's a novel way to do slivers. Given how mechanically different it is from existing slivers, it likely makes more sense to use breed on another type of creature, but thematically it's perfect for slivers, so that's how I'll present it for now:

Friday, October 31, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day10/30/2014 - Just a reusable Zealous Conscripts. "Just."

War Recruiter is restricted to hitting untapped creatures, which limits its power a bit, and encourages players to attack with their creatures, which was the real inspiration for the card: "You're guys will attack for you, or they'll attack for me, but no sitting on their asses."

We're intending to give Tesla a theme of progress, and that focus is tied up with the trappings of Steam Punk and artifacts. Thus far we've come up with a multitude of ways to convey progress, and a number more to interact with artifacts, but we haven't addressed their main overlap.How can we weave in the concept of technological advance?

Friday, October 24, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Cool Card Design of the Day10/20/2014 - It's awkward that Oblivion Ring and Banishing Light are targeted removal enchantments like Pacifism, but aren't auras, and you don't name your target until after the spell resolves. Here I take a stab at a couple alternate templates for an updated Journey to Nowhere.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

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About Us

We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.